The goal of this research is to study aspects pertaining to the use of backchannels by analyzing dialogues from Korean textbooks and Sejong spoken corpus and by drawing educational implications based on the analysis. Compared to previous researches in which backchannel expressions were extracted and listed, this study focused on functional facets of backchannels. As a result, the following aspects of use were found. First, frequency of use of backchannels in actual conversations of Koreans was found to be more than three times greater than the frequency found in dialogues from Korean textbooks. Second, regarding actual Korean conversations, more than half of the backchannels were expressions resulting from attentive listening; such expressions are the most passive. However, of dialogues from Korean textbooks, more than half of the related backchannels were requests for additional explanations, which represent the most active type. Third, one backchannel was used per turn in the former, whereas in the latter, more than two backchannels were used per turn.